At the end of crypto exchange Coinbase’s earnings call this week, CEO Brian Armstrong made a strange proclamation.
“I was a little distracted because I was tracking the prediction market about what Coinbase will say on their next earnings call and I just wanna add here the words, Bitcoin, Ethereum, blockchain, staking, and Web 3, to make sure we get those in before the end of the call,” he said.
While that may sound like a meaningless string of words to the uninitiated, Armstrong was upending attempts to make a buck by predicting what words he would use.
Prediction markets, most notably Polymarket, have long allowed crypto enthusiasts to bet on virtually anything from when the United States will confirm that aliens exist to whether president Donald Trump will say the word “tampon.”
But, as Armstrong concisely demonstrated, the odds can easily be manipulated by insiders, highlighting how fraught gambling on future events, particularly with the use of unregulated assets, can be.
There are currently no federal laws explicitly forbidding crypto gambling, leaving it up to states to set rules. Given Trump’s willingness to use his office as a way to sell dubious meme coins and make billions off crypto, that situation is unlikely to change any time soon.
Indeed, as Armstrong suggested during the earnings call, both prediction market sites Kalshi and Polymarket had open bets betting on what Coinbase leadership would say during its next earnings call.
Around 8 pm on Thursday, percentages for bets on the company saying the words “Bitcoin,” “Prediction Market,” and “Web 3” all shot up to just under 100 percent on Kalshi, perfectly aligning with Armstrong’s remarks at the end of Thursday’s earnings call.
As TradingView reports, both Kalshi and Polymarket saw $80,242 and $3,912 worth of bets placed, respectively.
Netizens were amused and impressed by Armstrong’s gambit.
“Keep breaking the fourth wall, Brian Armstrong,” one user tweeted. “This is as good as it gets.”
“This prediction market stuff is going to end badly,” another user warned. “Way too easy to manipulate, as Brian just showed us.”
“Lol, this was fun — happened spontaneously when someone on our team dropped a link in the chat,” Armstrong tweeted later.
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